Overview

Remote Direct Memory Management (RDMA) is the remote memory management capability that allows server to server data movement directly between application memory without any CPU involvement. RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) is a mechanism to provide this efficient data transfer with very low latencies on lossless Ethernet networks. With advances in data center convergence over reliable Ethernet, Mellanox’s NICs with RoCE uses the proven and efficient RDMA transport to provide the platform for deploying RDMA technology in mainstream data center application at 10GbE, 40GbE and 56GbE link-speed.
The Mellanox NICs with its hardware offload support takes advantage of this efficient RDMA transport (InfiniBand) services over Ethernet to deliver ultra-low latency for performance-critical and transaction intensive applications such as financial, data base, storage, and content delivery networks.
Mellanox’ ConnectX-3 Pro supports RoCE which allows RDMA to be used across both L2 and L3 networks thanks to IP and UDP headers.

Soft-RoCE

RoCE can be implemented in the hardware as well as in the software. Mellanox adapters include hardware implementation of RoCE to deliver the highest performance and efficiency. Soft-RoCE is the software implementation of the RoCE standard and compatible with any standard Ethernet networks.